IIT-KGP at MEDIQA 2019: Recognizing question entailment using Sci-BERT stacked with a gradient boosting classifier

Abstract

The number of people turning to the Internet to search for a diverse range of health-related subjects continues to grow and with this multitude of information available, duplicate questions become more frequent and finding the most appropriate answers becomes problematic. This issue is important for question-answering platforms as it complicates the retrieval of all information relevant to the same topic, particularly when questions similar in essence are expressed differently, and answering a given medical question by retrieving similar questions that are already answered by human experts seems to be a promising solution. In this paper we present our novel approach to detect question entailment by determining the type of question asked rather than focusing on the type of the ailment given. This unique methodology makes the approach robust towards examples which have different ailment names but are synonyms of each other. Also it enables us to check entailment at a much more fine-grained level.